Comment by inferiorhuman
3 years ago
The CIA has a huge blind spot for non-European food. Check out the Chinese Cooking Demystified youtube channel. They did a video on the CIA's laughably bad mapo tofu recipe. It was bad enough that simply following the instructions got their neighbors up in arms.
...The world, for just a moment, was a far more interesting place. Then the realization that no, the Central Intelligence Agency does not have a crack division of crypto-culinary experts in the midst of a cold war, attempting to thwart or coordinate psyops in which they sabotage other nations morale through spreading deliberate, yet subtly disasterous cooking advice.
Thailand's culinary diplomacy program isn't _too_ far off
My kid goes to a camp that abbreviates its name as CIA (the C stands for Camp and the IA are the initials of some old rich guy) and it always throws me.
I imagined it as them needing to have experienced chefs on hand to teach ethnic cuisine skills, so that deep-cover spies wouldn't be unmasked by their inability to make the local cuisine.
Yeah, they use vacuum cleaner salesmen instead.
That book is way more useful for techniques than the recipes in it. I wouldn't dream of trying their mapo tofu!
Pretty much everything from the technique to the details were pretty far off the mark. It was pretty cringeworthy to watch.
I meant the techniques portion of the book, not techniques for the Mapo Tofu.
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